Talk:Acronym (organization)

Should capitalize ACRONYM

Because that's what this political entity calls itself and because of MOS:TMRULES, which says that initialisms such as IKEA or IBM should be capitalized. XavierItzm (talk) 12:36, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Reposting what I posted on Talk:Tara McGowan: Although I was the one who changed it from Acronym to ACRONYM, unfortunately I'm not sure that it is a real acronym or initialism. ACRONYM does not actually stand for anything, which by definition does not really qualify it as one. I believe that the name has been chosen as a sort of a joke, and stylized as if it is a real acronym although it is not one. MOS:TMRULES says that IKEA should be capitalized, but as per IKEA, it is short for Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd, and IBM is short for International Business Machines (Corporation). However, MOS:TMRULES says that we should also write Time not TIME, and Sony not SONY, as these are not initialisms but rather styled in all caps. I think that Acronym unfortunately falls into the latter category, although the implicit suggestion in Acronym's own name that it is an acronym might mean that there is some nuance here, but really I don't think that the irony of it should sway us against convention. Cookieo131 (talk) 18:44, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

Companies "under" Acronym

@LawrenceWaterhouse59: thanks for your contributions to this page! The updates you added about the ownership status of Shadow were badly needed, and I'm quite glad that the article now notes that Acronym did divest from Shadow, rather than implying that it still owned it many months later. I'm here in pursuit of consensus about these sentences (refs removed for cleanliness): "In addition to Shadow, Inc., Acronym has owned several for-profit corporations, including the digital strategy firm Lockwood Strategy, the media company FWIW Media, and an apparel company called Rogue Swag. Courier Newsroom, which describes itself as a 'progressive media company', is owned by Acronym" in this edit and this edit. The cited source says: "Acronym has a web of for-profit companies beneath it: a campaign consulting firm (Lockwood Strategy), a political tech company with a peer-to-peer texting product (Shadow) and a media company investing in local left-leaning outlets (FWIW Media). In the works is an apparel arm (Rogue Swag)". It looks like Rogue Swag never existed as a corporate entity but ended up just being a campaign by Acronym -- I'll go reword the sentence right now to fix that. But Courier and Lockwood are attested in multiple reliable sources, and many other sources cited in that section have exactly the same message about Acronym running many for-profit companies in an umbrella structure -- indeed this for-profit umbrella structure is often portrayed as the central innovation that to my mind made Acronym notable enough for a Wikipedia article in the first place. Now what I think is extremely possible is that Acronym no longer owns the specific brands mentioned in the text that you're removing, which is why after your first edit I changed the text to make sure that it's not in present tense (which it shouldn't be anyways). I can see two ways that the text might be wrong. One possibility is that I did not summarise what Fouriezos wrote sufficiently -- that's always possible, maybe in this context "owns" is different from "has a web of for-profit companies", and if you think it would be more accurate with different wording then please do make whatever changes you think would line the wording up more closely with the source. The other possibility is that there is other, stronger evidence that Acronym did not own those brands, and Nick Fouriezos at Ozy was incorrect. That's also completely possible, but if that's the case then we need to have enough sources that say the opposite for them to be more credible than the Fouriezos article, and right now we have none. - Astrophobe (talk) 17:16, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

Yup. Marquardtika (talk) 19:37, 21 May 2020 (UTC)